Review: Drop It!

Published by Steve Litchfield at 8:04 UTC, January 27th 2012

Summary:

Although I'm a fan of casual games, there does come a point where a casual title can be just a little... too casual. Drop It!, with a total game time as short as a few seconds and as long as you can keep the main gameplay going (around a minute or so in my case), runs very close to this boundary but redeems itself with several physics options, a dash of strategy and a little genuine excitement.

 

 

The idea here, as the single help screen suggests, is to guide a ball through horizontal cracks in a never-ending series of ledges by tilting your smartphone left and right, with the ball behaving more or less faithfully to the laws of physics, i.e. rolling down each ledge and accelerating, depending on how severely you're tilting the phone.

 

 

 

Three types of ball are available - as you might expect, each has different properties: the Metal ball plays most easily as it falls quickly and doesn't bounce around, so can be quickly rolled along ledges towards a crack; the Rubber ball falls quickly but then bounces off the ledge a few times - these have to be allowed for; while the Pingpong ball floats downwards more slowly and bounces wildly as well - consider this the 'hard' option in Drop It!

 

 

 

One, three or four points is/are scored for each crack dropped through, depending on ball type chosen. Although '+1', '+2' and '+3' legends appear on screen they don't always seem to be bonuses, merely confirmation that you've just dropped through two or three cracks in one go (i.e. one above the other), though occasional scoring oddities indicate that there's some degree of extra incentive being applied here. The developer's not clear about the exact scoring system used.

In fact, this is where strategy comes in, in addition to changing ball types to get greater scores per ledge at the risk of not clearing each one as easily. You see, the ledges start rising from the bottom of the screen faster and faster as the game goes on - if your ball is left stranded at the top of the screen at any point then the game is over. And a good way to keep making progress is to keep an eye on the ledge (or two) below the current one, factoring in the position of those cracks and coordinating ball trajectories such that you can drop through multiple cracks in one go, or at least make a smoother, less jerky path for the ball.

And that's Drop It! - I'll accept that it's possible to get longer game times from it, given the included online high score table, shown below - if I believe the datestamps, it seems that 'QQ269' got his high scores with roughly seven minute play times, though I wouldn't put it past online players to resort to trickery - a common technique when people wanted to cheat at my own Atomic Tetris clone was to run something intensive in the background to slow the gameplay down and make reaction times less critical! People, eh?

 

 

 

As is common these days, Drop It! is available in ad-laden (above, right) form for free or by buying the commercial, ad-free version at £1.50. I've linked to both above, so take your pick.

Drop It! is simple, it's casual, but it's also fun and adds a little adrenaline into small moments of downtime in your day. Worth an install, I think.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 27 January 2012

 

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